These strangers, coming perhaps from afar, supply us with valuable information. They tell us that, if the shores of the gulf had the Mosquito as chief representative of the insect class, the woods had the Weevil. Apart from the snout-bearing family, the pages of my Apt rock show me scarcely anything else, especially in the order of the Beetles. Where are the other terrestrial groups, the Carabus, [16] the Dung-beetle, [17] the Capricorn, [18] whom the wash of the rains, indifferent as to its harvest, would have brought to the lake even as it did the Weevil? There is not the least vestige of those tribes, so prosperous to-day. Where are the Hydrophilus, [19] the Gyrinus, [20] the Dytiscus, [21] all inhabitants of the water? These lacustrians had every chance of being handed down to us as mummies between two sheets of marl. If there were any in those days, they used to live in the lake, whose mud would have preserved these horn-clad insects even more effectually than the little fishes and more especially the Fly. Well, of these aquatic Beetles there is no trace either. Where were they, where were those who are missing from the geological reliquary? Where were the inhabitants of the thickets, of the green-swards, of the worm-eaten tree-trunks: Capricorns, borers of wood; Sacred Beetles, workers in dung; Carabi, disembowellers of game? One and all were in the limbo of the time to come. The present of that period did not possess them; the future awaited them. The Weevil, if I may credit the modest records which I am able to consult, must therefore be the oldest of the Beetles. In the beginning, life fashioned oddities which would be screaming discords in the present harmony of things. When it invented the saurian, it revelled at first in monsters from fifteen to twenty yards long. It placed horns upon their noses and above their eyes, paved their backs with fantastic scales, and hollowed their necks into spiny pouches wherein their heads withdrew as into a hood. It even tried, though with no great success, to give them wings. After these horrors, the procreating ardour calmed down and produced the charming Green Lizard of our hedges. When it invented the bird, it filled its beak with the reptile’s pointed teeth and suspended from its rump a long, feather-clad tail. These indeterminate and revoltingly hideous creatures were the distant prelude to the Robin Redbreast and the Dove. All these primitives are noted for a very small skull, an idiot’s brain. The prehistoric animal is first and foremost an atrocious machine for grabbing, with a stomach for digesting. The intellect does not count as yet. That will come later.